In ISIS, the Taliban Face an Insurgent Threat of Their Own

An Afghan police officer jumped from a wall after a suicide bomb attack at a Police Headquarters on Monday in Jalalabad.Credit
Parwiz/Reuters

JALALABAD, Afghanistan — For nearly as long as the Taliban have been at war, Maulvi Abbas has been in the middle of it, leading a small squad of insurgent fighters in Nangarhar Province and demonstrating a certain talent for survival and success.

But in May, he was captured by the Taliban’s newest enemy, the Islamic State, said residents in one of the districts where Maulvi Abbas often stayed.

Throughout the month, fighters claiming allegiance to the Islamic State’s caliph had been attacking veteran Taliban units south and east of Jalalabad, the provincial capital. In one district, Islamic State loyalists have replaced the Taliban as the dominant insurgent power, and elsewhere they have begun making inroads in Taliban territory, one tribal elder, Mohammad Siddiq Mohmand, said in an interview.

On Wednesday, a spokesman for the Afghan Army corps responsible for the region said Islamic State fighters had captured and beheaded 10 Taliban who had been fleeing a military offensive, though that account has not been confirmed by other officials.

In places where militants in Afghanistan have adopted the Islamic State creed of embracing atrocity and ruling by fear, their strategy has been to aggressively attack the Taliban, just as in Syria where the group early on picked fights with more established units affiliated with Al Qaeda. And the evidence so far this spring suggests the influence of the Islamic State is growing.

Those places of influence remain few — still just a few remote villages after months of effort — and the lightning-quick rise to power that the Islamic State enjoyed in Syria and Iraq has not come to pass in Afghanistan.

But already, the Islamic State-inspired militants have created a significant shift: The Taliban insurgency, even as it advances against the Western-backed government, is having to wrestle with an insurgent threat of its own.

After more than a decade of remaining remarkably unified around the elusive figure of Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban are splintering to a degree not seen before, as hundreds of insurgents have shifted their loyalty to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State and self-declared caliph of the Muslim world.

More is at stake than just which militant Sunni faction controls remote villages. Should the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, make larger inroads within Taliban-controlled territory, it could fundamentally change the insurgency. While the Taliban have carried out public executions and embraced suicide bombings, the Islamic State’s embrace of violence — and penchant for publicizing it through videos and Internet social media — is extreme even by the Taliban’s standards.

Through their history, the Taliban have sought to convince Afghans and foreign leaders that their ambitions are limited to Afghanistan, which the group governed for about five years before being toppled in 2001. A central Taliban demand has always been the rule of Afghanistan by Afghans, a platform that resonates well in a country shaped by a history of dogged resistance to foreign invaders.

Unlike the Islamic State, the Taliban have shown a willingness to negotiate with regional powers, albeit in a limited way. Recently, the Taliban announced that they had sent a delegation to Iran — which has long viewed the Taliban’s brand of Sunni extremism with a wariness bordering on hostility — as part of a broader series of diplomatic trips to several countries to “discuss bilateral issues, form, expand and strengthen ties.” The move comes at a time when the Iranian government is directly helping the fight against Islamic State units in Syria and Iraq.

“Daesh has been recruiting in Afghanistan since at least April 2014, without much success so far, considering how long they’ve been at it,” said Graeme Smith, a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group in Kabul, using the Islamic State’s Arabic acronym. “We started tracking groups last fall, and they usually number in the dozens. Some number in the hundreds, but none in the thousands.”

Still, for the Taliban, the new Islamic State offshoots clearly present the worry of larger-scale defections.

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Although some of the Islamic State units are said to be bolstered by foreign fighters — in the north, for example, bands of fighters allied with the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan have declared allegiance to the Islamic State — most are said to be led by former Taliban. Some had been thrown out over ideological differences or for insubordination.

Perhaps seeking to keep from widening the phenomenon, the Taliban have so far dealt somewhat gingerly with the Islamic State upstarts they find in their midst. In several places across the country, they have sent delegations to Islamic State units with what often boils down to a cease and desist message, local leaders say.

In Nangarhar, tribal elders speak of several different groups of Islamic State fighters, most numbering several scores of men.

In Bati Kot District, about 25 miles southeast of Jalalabad, Maulvi Abbas had told Islamic State fighters based in the village of Chardahi that their black flag was not welcome. As a commander who was with the Taliban when they seized power in the 1990s, he is seen as a notable local figure.

One resident, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation by militants, characterized Maulvi Abbas’s message as: “The Taliban had been fighting the Afghan government for the last decade, and it wasn’t necessary for the Islamic State to show up.”

The Islamic State’s response was to demand that Maulvi Abbas’s men defect from the Taliban, the resident said. A series of skirmishes ensued, during which Maulvi Abbas was taken hostage, several residents as well as a military commander said.

On the opposite side of the country, in Farah Province, along Afghanistan’s border with Iran, however, the Taliban have managed to quell the splinter groups’ momentum. When the Islamic State established a training camp there this year, it quickly recruited hundreds of young men — as many as 600, mostly local Taliban fighters or sympathizers, according to Abdul Khaliq, the district governor for Farah’s Khaki Safed District, which was the base of the Islamic State’s organization in the province.

The Taliban’s top commander in Farah began asking local religious scholars to preach in mosques about how an Islamic State presence in Afghanistan would be a dangerous development. This effort seemed to quickly persuade more than half of the Islamic State’s newest recruits to return to the Taliban, Mr. Khaliq said.

Then the Taliban laid siege to the training camp. After days of heavy fighting in late May, the Taliban pursued fleeing Islamic State fighters, eventually securing their surrender after a firefight that killed at least a dozen Taliban and Islamic State fighters, according to Mr. Khaliq.

Under the terms of the surrender, the Islamic State commanders as well as a few non-Afghan fighters among them were allowed to leave Farah, Mr. Khaliq said, but about 55 of the group’s fighters became the Taliban’s prisoners.

A version of this article appears in print on June 5, 2015, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Inroads by ISIS Present Taliban With Their Own Insurgent Threat . Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe